Long Beach’s waterfront party is its oldest tradition, for better and worse
By Dave Wielenga

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY

The Long Beach Sea Festival begins its summer run this weekend, continuing a tradition that goes back further than even its current organizers realize, yet holding very faithfully to that tradition—all the way down to the part where everybody continues hoping the thing will turn a profit.

“Sea Festival, as it was originally known, has been taking place in Long Beach for almost 50 years,” Chris Pook wrote in 2003 at the outset of an 11-page prospectus for which the city paid him $40,000 and ultimately appointed him executive director of the event. “It was originally conceived as a Community activity utilizing The City’s natural assets of The Ocean and The Beach and featured such activities as swimming, sailing and sand castle building.”

In fact, Long Beach’s history of celebrating life along its waterfront goes back 99 years, to September 1-5, 1908, and an event called the Festival of the Sea.

“Arrangements for the Festival of the Sea . . . are rapidly nearing completion and those in charge assert that it will be the finest thing of its kind ever attempted in the Southwest,” gushed an August 29, 1908, article in the Los Angeles Times. “An especial effort has been made from the first to give a peculiar flavor of the sea to the entire programme, and in following out this idea a number of novelties will be introduced.”

Those “novelties” included twice-a-day jumps from a hot-air balloon into the ocean by a parachutist on fire, contests among “three airships of the aeroplane type,” exhibitions of wireless telegraphy and local poultry, athletic events, a battle of bands, and a different parade every day—one comprised entirely of automobiles. Downtown streets were lined with vendors’ booths, the corners featured vaudeville stages, and buildings were hung with flags, bunting, and streamers.

“Street cars and trains came into town crowded with visitors. Up and down the brilliantly lighted streets they strolled, stopping to buy a ‘red hot’ or an orangeade,” reported a September 2 follow-up. “To carry out the idea of the sea, boatloads of kelp and seaweed were brought in from Catalina and festooned about the streets.”

But the centerpiece of the original Festival of the Sea was the crowning of an honorary Queen and King, replete with their courts, in a throne placed in a gigantic replica of a seashell. The shell was set in the surf before a specially-constructed grandstand on the sand that seated (depending on newspaper accounts) 10,000 or 15,000 or 25,000 spectators.

“It was as though the city had been transformed into one of the impossible scenes from the Arabian Nights,” reported the Times. “Never was a fete begun under more auspicious conditions.”

This year’s Sea Festival features 88 events, mostly things like fishing and sandcastle contests, along with water skiing and sailing races; but also special themed weekends devoted to the Louisiana bayou, Caribbean pirates, and South Seas tikis. The centerpiece is a pro volleyball tournament to be contested in a huge temporary stadium.

Pook’s contract requires that the city receive a $20,000 return. That doesn’t sound like much, especially considering that his budget is dominated by $280,000 in donations from city agencies and uncounted work-hours by city employees.
Still, if Pook finishes in the red, it won’t be a first for the Sea Festival—or for the Festival of the Sea.

A little more than six months after the extraordinary reviews of Long Beach’s elaborate aqua fair, the Times ran this headline in its March 31, 1909, edition: SOCIETY WOMEN AMONG SUED.

“Society and club women, leading merchants and professional men were served today with papers in a suit instituted by Martin H. Jackson to recover $66.50,” the paper reported. “The complaint, filed with Justice Brayton, contains the names of 100 defendants, most of them members of the Chamber of Commerce and the Ebell Club.

“The suit is an echo of the Festival of the Sea given last fall, and is for services in designing a number of floats and the Queen’s throne. The festival was an artistic success, but a financial failure, and Jackson is only one of many creditors.”

In fact, it took five years to pay off the Festival of the Sea, an accomplishment the Times noted on February 21, 1913. By that time, the event was no longer remembered for its glory but as “a fiesta which plunged the chamber and many private citizens in debt because of inclement weather and extravagant expenses of reckless committeemen.”

At least they used their own money.